I went to the itSMF Central London regional group meeting the other day; the theme of the meeting was “Service Transition Lifecycle: a Balancing Act”. I’ve been to several regional group meetings over the years, and I’ve given presentations at a few, but I think this was the best one I’ve attended. There was a good mix of people there – representing public and private sector, vendors and consultants – which made for a great deal of healthy debate. The “spine” of the day consisted of two good presentations – one from Jack Robertson-Worsfold of iCore and the other from Greg Downing of Atos Origin (the hosts for the meeting).
The part of the day that really got the discussions going was a breakout session where, in small groups, we discussed our experience of introducing services into live operation – the hand-off from Service Transition to Service Operation. Everybody had horror stories of problems they had encountered – and there were some excellent ideas discussed for ways of ensuring the transition is as smooth as possible. Having just spent a year working in this type of role for a large retail organisation, many of the points raised echoed my own experiences.
I’m not going to go into the details of what was discussed here – this is a subject that I’m sure I will return to many times in my blog – but the overwhelming view of everyone present was that the transition of a service into operation needs to be planned as early in the service lifecycle as possible, and if you get it wrong, it doesn’t matter how good the service is, it will not be a success, and it will cost more in time and resource to put it right afterwards than it would have taken to get it right in the first place.
Congratulations to itSMF Central London Region for this session – well done to Michelle Hales of Connectsphere who facilitated the day, and thanks to Atos Origin who provided an excellent meeting space (with very comfortable chairs) and a decent lunch. Central London is not my “home” region, but I’ll certainly try to attend their meetings in the future. If you’re an itSMF UK member, you can see the presentations on the regional group web page.
